Dog Will Hunt (including Self-Publishing Stuff #2)

As I headed back to my campsite from the coffee shop near the religious college, I heard a thunderstorm advisory on the radio for the county next to the one I was camping in. I figured I’d probably be safe and went right to sleep as soon as I crawled into my tent.

Two or so hours later the storm hit. I thought my entire tent was going to blow right off the small cliff it was perched on. I grabbed all my stuff and ran through the rain to my van.

From an elementary school visit to the electrical room in the Boston Museum of Science I knew I’d be safe in the Odyssey. (But not because of the tires! It’s because the electricity stays on the outside of the van or something. All us elementary school kids were blown away by that fact.). I didn’t bother packing up the tent and stowing it. It’s only a fifteen dollar K-Mart job. I’m not going to get soaked and risk my life in an electrical storm for it.

After two hours of crappy, sitting-up sleep in my van (I hadn’t cleared a section in

the back because the rain was coming in sideways and opening the door would’ve gotten all my books wet) the storm cleared. I dragged all my stuff back to the tent (which had stayed relatively dry on the inside) and went back to sleep.

Half an hour later the storm was back, but it didn’t seem quite so strong and I decided to wait it out in the tent. I counted Mississippis between lightning strikes and thunder crashes. When I got down to one Mississi- I ran to my van with all my stuff on my back and under my arms.

I spent most of the remainder of the night in the van. The rain got much worse, and by morning, the inside of my tent was soaked and the outside was covered in disgusting reddish, clayish mud.

After eating sardines and crackers for breakfast (Don’t worry, Kristen. I come from Vikings.) I cleaned up all my stuff as best I could, packed it all into the back of the van, and headed for Nashville.

Nashville is a fun city. I went into 46 different boot stores but bought no boots. I ate dinner at some bar where a country band was playing. The waitress called me darlin‘—that kind of made my millennium. She asked me where I was from and hung out with me for a while, so I gave her a 21% tip.

The band was very good and I enjoyed the music, but I didn’t recognize a single song in half an hour of listening. As I finished my pulled pork with spicy bbq sauce sandwich, they took a break. In the near silence that followed I heard the sounds of something familiar coming from a ceiling speaker in the corner of the room. I climbed off of my stool and walked over to hear better. I stood under the speaker and realized what it was—Take My Breath Away by Berlin was playing on the radio. The volume had been turned down very low for the live band, but I could hear just enough of the timeless classic to make me feel a little less out of place.

At the age of five I got punched in the arm for admitting to my best friend that Take My Breath Away was my favorite song. Apparently he thought it was a song for girls. His favorite song at the time was Thriller.

After Nashville, I hopped in my van and headed for some relatives of friends. This situation made me nervous, but I’d had enough of thunderstorms and the people I was meeting up with were rumored to be the funnest people on the planet.

I pulled into their driveway in the early evening and two dogs ran out to greet me. The fact that there were dogs involved made me feel better. I found out later that one of their names is Lucky because he was hit by a car when he was a puppy and barely survived. One of his legs is shorter than the other three. He runs a little funny because of this.

I met the uncle of my sister’s friend (she’s my friend, too, but not so much so), his partner, and their aunt and mother. The mother lives with them and the aunt was visiting from Connecticut.

The partner and I drove to Bubba’s to get some beer. We took his fully restored 1967 mustang. When I sat down in the car I automatically reached over my right shoulder for the seatbelt. He informed me that the car had no over the shoulder strap seatbelts. “Dude, it’s a 1967.” He also advised me not to wear the lap belt since they’re more dangerous than no seat belt at all.

I was instructed to say that the beer in the cup holder was mine if we were pulled over. Passengers are allowed to have open containers in Tennessee. He told me this particular law is referred to as the hillbilly law. And then he said, “Don’t worry about saying it in front of hillbillys—they call it the hillbilly law, too!”

We grabbed the beer and got back in the car. Again, I reached over my shoulder for the seatbelt, and again, I was told there was no such seatbelt. “Dude, it’s still a 1967.”

The first night we just drank Natty Ice and watched movies while getting to know each other.

The next day all the neighbors came over (the house I was staying in is the biggest house on the street complete with stables, horses, and an inground pool). The partner, a local girl, and I went four-wheeling.

I’d never been on one before, but mine was an automatic and it was easy enough to learn quickly. When I asked if I should wear a helmet I was told it was too hot for helmets. This was fine with me.

We tooled around on those things for hours and hours. Across the street from their house, three neighbors with about 100 acres of land each agreed to build interconnecting trails for four wheelers. The girl who rode with us wore a t-shirt that read, “Party Like A Southern Girl.” The country dogs (brother and sister who came with the house and refuse to go inside and hunt rabbits and birds and herd horses) who’d greeted me when I pulled in followed us every mile of the way (usually taking short cuts through the woods and meeting up with us at impasses). We rode through a creek and past a lake, saw two deer, a tobacco field, and a hay field, and the girl we were with peed in the woods. It was probably the best day of my life.

Back at the house, after taking the four wheelers over a homemade ramp a few times, we swam and had drinks by the pool with all the neighbors. That night we watched movies until we fell asleep.

If I ever get the chance, I’m visiting them again. I’m also buying a four wheeler as soon as I get home.

The fact that one of them read my entire book on the night I left and wrote me a very complimentary letter about it makes me like them even more.

Fanny pack updates:

While in Nashville, a guy in pretty dumpy clothes (but not obviously homeless) came up to me, pointed at my fanny pack, and said, “Hey, that’s one of those pouches everyone’s talking about it.” I asked him if he wanted change. He said yes, I handed him about a dollar in quarters and dimes and continued on my way. No one compliments the fanny pack unless they either want something or they’ve forgotten to take their Thorazine.

And the other day, I walked into a small town library wearing my fanny pack and a very unfortunate looking girl pointed and laughed at me. She was probably about fifteen, grossly overweight, wearing a belly shirt and daisy dukes, and sporting a chocolate milk moustache.

I don’t care what anyone says about the fanny pack. If my wearing it makes a girl like that feel like she’s not the lamest person in the room, well then that’s doing the lord’s work—like the time I wore a sweatshirt with an embroidered heart floating above two embroidered kissing brontosauruses to school in sixth grade—but with less bloody embroidery.

The other day, I got an e-mail from an old DMR coworker, another direct caregiver. She’d heard about the book and ordered a copy and seemed very enthusiastic to read it. I really hope she likes it. But at the end of her e-mail, she informed me that DMR headquarters is very worried about the book and doesn’t know what to do about it. I’m not sure exactly what to write about this at the moment, but it does worry me a little bit and I thought I should mention it here. I guess I just have to wait and see at this point. Probably nothing much will come of this.

Self-Publishing Stuff #2 – Other Self-Publishers!

Before I get into other aspects of my own method (upcoming topics such as writing, formatting, printing, getting library readings), I figured it would be fun to compile a list of other, more famous authors who’ve self-published.

This list was put together with the help of my writing group, a group that meets in upstate New York every summer to read to each other and critique.

Please keep in mind that many of these authors did not self-publish their first works, and I understand that this is a very different phenomenon from self-publishing a first work and then somehow making it into the main stream. But some of these authors did self-publish their first works, and either way, I think this list kind of helps to cast self-publishing in a more respectable and legitimate light.

Please also keep in mind that I am not comparing myself to these people.

Feel free to add other authors or information if you’re aware of it. I’m sure many people will appreciate this.

(I didn’t write much of this and a Google search was involved for some of it. My father, an English professor and member of the writing group, was also very helpful.)

Margaret Atwood, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, E.E. Cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.

Percy Bysshe Shelley self published his Gothic Romances and "The
Necessity of Atheism."
William Blake self published "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of
Experience."

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, was originally self-published for his students. One of his students was E. B. White. It was pretty amusing before White added his touch and brought it into the 20th century.

Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was published by Ticknor & Fields, but they would publish it only if he paid for it, which he did. Later, they shipped him about 700 (out of 1000) unsold books, most of them still unbound, which he stored in his family attic until the book was re-published when he died.

Whitman did everything from setting the type to writing reviews of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. He also sent it to prominent literary people, among them Emerson, who wrote the famous letter that Whitman promptly affixed to the back cover of the next edition, probably to Emerson's chagrin (a traditionally published author quoted parts of this letter to me at the release party for DMR).

Ben Franklin was even more of a one-man show, since he owned one of two printing presses in Philadelphia. Old Ben's list of accomplishments with this printing press are staggering. He even printed money (the original Benjamins). Thomas Paine met Ben in London, and Ben told this young man who had failed at everything he'd ever tried to go to America and gave him letters of introduction. Paine got on a ship, went to Philly, and got a job writing for a magazine. He wrote essays against slavery, for women's rights, and then, not much more than a year after he arrived, wrote Common Sense, anonymously, which called for a Declaration of "Independance." It was an immediate best-seller and went through many reprintings in its first few months.